Question Lenovo YOGA 7 laptop throttles while folded

Dec 7, 2022
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Recently we have bought my wife a new Lenovo laptop mainly for the designer work purposes. The model is Yoga 7 16IAH7, it comes with a discrete ARC 370m GPU. My wife wanted to be able to draw with a stylus without having to use a separate tablet. So this model, which combines a full-fledged, powerful Windows computer with a tablet, was perfect for us.
Unfortunately, I've noticed that in folded or "tent" mode, the system severely reduces the power of the graphics card. Statistics shows that the GPU core power drops from the 24-28w with 100% GPU in Laptop mode, to a 16-18w with 70% GPU in folded mode. In games (I used the Death Stranding as a benchmark) pure performance drops from 45 to 10-15 FPS when you fold the laptop, same goes for any 3d application.
Is there any way to fix this performance throttling? For us folded or "tent" mode functionality was the primary reason why we bought this laptop in the first place. The laptop runs Windows 11, all necessary drivers and updates been installed.
 

Ralston18

Titan
Moderator
How/where are the performance changes being viewed: Task Manager, Resource Monitor, some other tool or utility?

Try disabling any and all power/screen savers to determine if the power remains at the unfolded mode levels.

First look in Task Manager and Resource Monitor (use both tools but only one tool at a time to observe system performance when unfolded.

Second, fold the Lenovo laptop and again watch. What, if anything changes. My thought is that when the laptop is folded that is being detected and the system starts (or maybe stops) doing other things in the background.

Check Task Manager > Startup for any unrecognized apps being launched at startup. Likewise look in Task Scheduler for something being triggered when the laptop is "folded". May take some time and effort to get a sense of what could be happening.

Process Explorer (Microsoft, free) can be downloaded and installed. Objective being to determine what all the laptop is doing (or trying do) when unfolded and then again, while folded. Some process change.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

If unable to discover any software or configuration related suspects then the problem could be hardware.

I.e., folding the laptop may be physically affecting some connector/connection or other component causing power to be reduced.

Take a peek in Reliability History and Event Viewer for error codes, warnings, and even informational events. Reliability History is much more user friendly and the time line format can be very revealing. Especially when there is some distinct action (unfolded vs folded) involved.

Event Viewer is much the same but not at all as intuitive as Reliability History.

Therefore:

http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-3128616/windows-event-viewer.html

Take your time in "poking about" to get a sense of things: mostly focus for some difference(s) between unfolded and folded.

No need to rush or take any immediate actions. Simply watch, look for single events or patterns of events. Keep notes.

Avoid changes if possible but if necessary change only one thing at a time.
 
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Dec 7, 2022
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How/where are the performance changes being viewed: Task Manager, Resource Monitor, some other tool or utility?
....
Thank you so much for the reply!
I'm measuring system activity via the built in intel ARC overlay, it shows most of the system processes and hardware related loads.
So I've looked at the processes as you advised and did some simple tests. One process in particular was causing a strange effect on the system. With "Lenovo Notebook ITS Service" running the system behaves as I explained in the original post, however when I disable it the performance in folded mode improves considerably while performance in the laptop mode suffers by around 25%. So I guess this system plays some important role in directing the power and ventilation inside the laptop.
 

Ralston18

Titan
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Dec 7, 2022
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Interesting.

Continue testing and watching. If you can monitor temperatures do so as well.
So I did some digging and got an aswer from Lenovo support. They say that it is an intended feature of the laptop.
I guess the problem is related to the hardware cooling policy during the fully flipped tablet mode, since the folded state physically blocks the air intake grill by the back side of the screen partition the laptop automatically underpowers the GPU so it would not produce any additional heat.
So I've tested the laptop in various scenarios and most I've got was by the turning off the "Lenovo Notebook ITS Service", in the Windows system services. The performance in tablet mode improved considerably however it was nowhere close to the Laptop mode performance. What's worse the laptop mode itself suffered without the "Lenovo Notebook ITS Service" running in the background, I got around 25% less performance in my tests.
So the bottom line is: The folded mode, or the tent mode automatically switches the laptop to a less demanding energy efficient and less heat producing mode. It doesn't seem to be possible to reconfigure it, at least not in the current state of the software.

Anyway thanks for the attention and advices!